News Roundup: Ghostcrawler Interviews, Pi Day, Blue Posts

Patch 5.2 Ghostcrawler Interviews

Following Patch 5.2's launch, Ghostcrawler has been conducting several more interviews with fansites. There was a live interview with Twizzcast we highlighted in a recent newspost, and there were also two more interviews this week:

MMORPG also interviewed Ghostcrawler for their podcast, and you can find a transcription here. Ghostcrawler talks at length about bringing back a sense of danger and exploration into WoW, and how to keep people engaged with WoW in the future. At this point, Blizzard is not only working on Patch 5.3 and the next expansion, but has ideas drawn up for several more.

Pi Day Celebration

Pi Day was yesterday and the Warcraft team celebrated in style by posting this picture to their Facebook:

Click the cut to read blue posts on the challenges behind an item/content squish, and the origins of the Community Managers' avatars!

Content Squish Discussion

Taepsilum

Well first of all, let me just say this pre-emptively, we’re not planning to do something like this anytime soon, but there’s no reason why we can’t speculate and talk about potentially good ideas. You never know, some might strike a chord with the devs and suddenly something might get implemented.

So let’s think about this, in theory, this is obviously a cool idea, and it’s something that players occasionally talk about, especially old school players that miss the old content and wish that they could go back in time and enter those raids while still having the same feeling that an end-game environment provides. Of course we could say that you can still do those raids and lock your characters’ xp if you want, but I admit that it definitely won’t be the same endgame experience now as it used to be back then.

The issue that I personally have with this idea is that having a lot of content from where to choose from may seem like something good and positive, but in my opinion there are few issues that are probably not that easy to deal with.

LimitsIf you have 30+ raids from where to choose from, then you also need a system that limits the amount of raids you can do per week, else it will frustrate players, especially completionists, as players will feel that to maximize their characters potential, they will have to run most (if not all) of those raids every single week.

Tuning & BalanceCurrently we have only a few raids available at level 90 and they’re already hard enough to tune perfectly, imagine doing this for every single raid in WoW, there’s no way that the quality of balance and tuning would be on par with what it is today.

Splitting the populationYou know, when there’s too much choice it’s easy to split players into smaller groups, imagine how hard would it be for guilds to decide where to go to when every single player has its own personal favourite raid or raid where he needs a particular loot from.

Sometimes more is less; too much choice can actually lead to stress and anxiety.

LootEach raid has unique pieces of loot; this would make the life of a minmax hardcore kind of player very, very hard.

Imagine if you had to get a specific piece of loot from 16 different raids to minmax your character, how frustrating would that be, and how lucky would you need to be to get all those pieces? Even if your guild would always choose the raid following only your personal needs, you would still need to have an incredible amount of luck to get all those BIS items.

I’m sure there are many other issues, maybe you can find good counterarguments to them which I’ll be very curious to read, I believe that this is a really nice topic and that it has great potential. I too think that it’s a shame to be losing such incredibly good endgame raid experiences that were once the “crème de la crème” on previous expansions, this is especially important for new players that never even got to experience them even once.The problem with that Acelius, is that players tend not to care about raiding while they are levelling and I doubt that could change. Even if some players wouldn’t mind to slow down their levelling pace to get some raiding done, I doubt it would be a great experience, because raiding typically requires coordination, time, and stability; and levelling players aren’t stable, they are constantly getting new abilities, gear, levels…

So the only way for raiding while levelling to be able to work would be by having a simplistic LFR style approach, but bringing back old raids, tuning them and balancing them properly just to have them exclusively available in LFR only mode would be a bit wasteful in my opinion. I’d rather see those instances restored back to their full glory so that they could shine once more as proper endgame, but then it’s like I said in my previous reply, the idea is nice but there are many problems associated with bringing back classic raids under these circumstances.

I’d love to be able to raid Sunwell Plateau, Ulduar and Blackwing Lair once more just as much as you probably do but the experience also cannot and should not feel inferior to what it used to be in the past or it would just be wrong to bring them back; that would be akin to making a bad remake of a good movie, everyone tends to hate those and prefer that they were never done in the first place.

Again this is mostly just my personal opinion, don’t take it as any sort of official company stance, I simply find it very interesting to let discussions like these have a chance to flourish, you guys do come up with some really cool ideas, and I like to give them a chance and contribute to increase their potential, if not, at least brainstorming is always a nice mental exercise, and speculating about game design also tends to make players a bit more understanding and comprehensive when it comes to other game related peculiarities, as they get to see that sometimes it’s very hard to come up with impeccable and perfect solutions that will please everyone.From your reasoning it seems like that the old raids are as good as they previously were at the moment, that is not the case. I do Sunwell Plateau and other raids with only 70s every week being an officer of one of the most active 70 twink guilds.

Absolutely, I agree with you, as I said on my first post:

Of course we could say that you can still do those raids and lock your characters’ xp if you want, but I admit that it definitely won’t be the same endgame experience now as it used to be back then.

What I meant was, if this change was to ever be introduced, it would have to be done the right way. If for some reason someone comes up with a poorly designed solution that ends up being better than an older implementation, I think that that’s still not a good enough excuse to implement it, any new implementations need to meet high quality standards, old content is the way it is currently not because we can’t tune it, but because we have the vast majority of raiders interested in level 90 content, and that’s where we have to prioritize our efforts on, if and when everything is perfect at level 90, we can then take a look and adjust older content more carefully, unfortunately (or fortunately), it’s just a matter of prioritization of resources.

It isn't the same as BC. (Not Before Christ, Burning Crusade. Once a guy misunderstood me on that.)

And here was I, thinking that you meant it wasn't the same as Bacon and Cheese, I agreed with you then and still agree with you now, old content now is definitely not the same as it was back then with Bacon and Cheese or Burning Crusade! hehehe ;)

Have a nice weekend!

Community Managers' Avatars

Nethaera

We definitely all have our stories and it's not anything secret. We've shared some insight in the past.

Usually when we gain a new member, they choose up to five potential names. Usually we try to find something no one else is using in the game. (There really used to be no other Nethaera's in existence.)

This one I'm using sort of came up as meaning "from the nether".

Then, they choose some potential avatars from various items or creatures in the game. Not a boss or main NPC. I personally liked the deceptive simplicity of a candle. The thing about candles is that they are used in so many ways from religious ceremonies, to clandestine meetings in darkened corridors and while they cast light, they also create shadow by doing so. Their job is to illuminate, but there's always something more in the shadows they cast too. ;)

I'll leave it to the other team members to share insight on their avatars should they wish.

I'm definitely curious though as to what others would pick.

Everyone has their process and story of how they arrived at their choice of avatar. In my case, I love birds (anyone following my Twitter account can tell you that) which is good for me; because World of Warcraft has a plethora of birds and bird-hybrids to choose from. With the gryphon already taken, that narrowed the field down slightly.

I wanted something that has a strong silhouette and colors that pop when shrunk down into the size of an icon.

My top choices were Anzu, Silver Covenant Hippogryph, Imperial Eagle, and Duskwing Eagle. The Silver Covenant Hippogryph became my first choice because Anzu couldn't fly and the eagles can be a Hunter's pet (you can't tame me!).

My manager, seeing that noone else has a hippogryph, approved it, and the rest was history.

As for my name, I picked Rygarius because it was easy to spell correctly and I wanted a name with gusto!

NOW THIS THREAD IS ABOUT ME

I remember sending in my five avatar suggestions, but I honestly don't remember what any of them are except for the Felwood tree. It wasn't my first choice though, actually it was my last. I always thought the Burton-esque face-trees in Felwood were just really creative and fun. I put them on the list just because I thought they were interesting, not because it was something I particularly identified with. I remember clearly the email came back from Kristen (Caydiem) saying "It's the tree." and I turned around (we were all in just a single room back then) and said "But... what about..." and unanimously everyone said "No. That's your avatar." and spent about 10 minutes giddily talking about how perfect it was as I sat there somewhat despondent because my higher-up choices were so immediately overlooked and what was almost a last second inclusion would represent who I was for the next X years. But it was actually a bit empowering that they felt it represented me so strongly. It may have also had to do with me having rather long and shaggy hair then, looking a bit like the twisted branches and leaves of the tree.

And I vomit a lot. A LOT. And it's neon green.

Of course it's something I've come to cherish, has represented so much of who I am throughout the years, and although the Drysc name remains retired I'm happy to be back in my goopy face-tree suit.

Originally, my top selection for my avatar was the Flame Revenant which I thought at the time was easily one of the coolest looking NPC models in game. The artist who conceived the look was also a friend. Sadly, I don't remember why I couldn't use it so I went back to the drawing board.

I'm embarrassed to admit (not really) that my next thought was to pick something I figured the ladies would think was cute. The Perky Pug was pretty new to the game back then and was my next choice. Voila, here I am! So far, though, my devious plans to take over the world with cuteness hasn't panned out very well.

How I got my name is a whole other process my foggy mind can't seem to remember. When I was a Game Master, I always picked Latin names that meant something relative to my determination to do a good job. When I crossed over to the Community team, I swear that was my intention but when I try to retrace my steps, I get lost somewhere between Elvish and Latin language translator websites.